Lili wimps out, and experts wonder why

By ELIOT KLEINBERG, COX NEWS SERVICE

Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, October 3, 2002

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- America went to bed Wednesday night expecting to spend the next day watching a near-catastrophic storm smash the Louisiana coastline. By midday yesterday, Lili was barely a hurricane.

What happened?

In a 27-hour period Tuesday and Wednesday, Lili grew from a minimal hurricane to a strong Category 4 on the Saffir-Simpson scale. But in a 10-hour stretch yesterday, top winds dropped from 145 mph to 100 mph at landfall around 11 a.m. and finally to 75 mph by 1 p.m.

Forecasters didn't see it coming.

"We did not have good guidance to indicate that would happen and still don't know, in a quantitative sense, why it occurred," National Hurricane Center Deputy Director Ed Rappaport said.

Whole Foods has been hacked and customer payment information compromisedWibbitz

North Korea Says Trump's Latest Threat Is a 'Declaration of War'TMTime

Minivan full of heroin, cocaine, guns, police sayWGAL

Disneyland Just Made Their Scariest Ride Even More Terrifying ( T+L Video)TaLTIME

Man, woman shot in HarrisburgWGAL

While forecasters have made dramatic strides in trying to pinpoint where a storm will strike, "we are quite open in acknowledging that we need help from the research community on intensity forecasting," Rappaport said. "It's our No. 1 priority we've listed for research needs."

The storm that fizzles isn't as unpleasant a surprise as one that strengthens in a hurry, especially just before landfall, leaving people with no or little time to prepare or get out. The storms that cause the greatest damage and most deaths often are those that have rapidly strengthened.

Rapid strengthening is defined as an increase of about 30 mph over 24 hours.

But the scary thing, he said, is researchers often don't know if or when a storm is going to suddenly strengthen or weaken.

In fact, Lili was forecast to strengthen only to a Category 3, and instead became a Category 4.

However, when storms fizzle as Lili did, there's a worry about crying wolf. In this case, "the wolf was out there," Rappaport said. "We had a NOAA buoy record a wind gust of 150 (mph) in the central Gulf that confirmed our estimates. But we don't have the ability to know it's going to drop off in those 12 hours. You have to go with the assumption that the storm is going to be at least as strong as we forecast, because it could get stronger, let alone weaken."

But of the storms that met all five conditions, only 43 percent rapidly strengthened, and when few or one factor was met, only about 10 percent did so.

Rappaport said researchers have some idea of the reasons a storm powers down -- a mix of ocean temperature, wind shear, moisture in the atmosphere and the storm's internal dynamics -- but can't really measure those factors and the complicated ways they act on each other.